The present disclosure relates to a medical search engine and annotation system, method of use, and computer software product.
Physicians today are inundated with both administrative information and medical information as dramatic advancements in the field of medicine are made. Communication within a medical organization today is difficult to manage at best and managing an Intranet can be expensive. Physicians and all health care workers have a difficult time managing the enormous amount of information required to do their job. Physicians can no longer rely on their memory to practice the most effective medicine. On average, primary care physicians have two clinical questions for every three patients they see, but they do not have an effective and efficient tool to look for an answer to these questions. As an illustration of how well this problem is known in the art, there is an old saying that half of what a doctor learns during medical training is outdated in five years. Because of this problem, there is a need for an information retrieval tool that can be integrated into the workflow of doctors in their practices, students in their training, and other healthcare personnel in the field.
Electronic sources of medical information are available. Such medical sources include Internet-based or other communications network-based web sites at which a user can request and retrieve medical information. Often these medical sources are directed to particular category of medical literature, for example, one source may focus on textbook text, others on journals, other on drug information, and still others practice guidelines for physicians and other health workers. It is desirable to be able to access one or more of these medical sources simultaneously so that a multi-disciplinary search can be performed. Searching such sources individually can be time consuming and bear considerable administrative overhead because each source may require entering into a separate licensing agreement and management of a separate set of access rights such as user licenses, user names, and passwords, and payment option. It is desirable to have a system, method, and/or computer program product that manages the disparate access rights, licenses, and payments in one simple interface.
Further, along with searching and managing medical resources, doctors and other users need a system that allows annotation and intelligent retrieval of information found using the system. It is desirable to have a system, method and computer program product that allows a user to assign retrieval or indexing related information, often referred to as metadata, to found search results, for more manageable and efficient information retrieval.